“Nonsense with your Thursday nights.”

“Everybody is just alike.  We shall have rain, see if we don’t; rain or no rain, I’ll whitewash to-morrow.”

Poor Joe!  That night ended my first sentiment.  He died with the measles in less than a month.

“I wish,” said Temperance, who was spelling over a newspaper, “that Dr. Snell would come in before the plum-cake is gone, that Hepsey made last.  The old dear loves it; he is always hungry.  I candidly believe Mis Grossman keeps him short.”

I expected that Temperance would break out then about Joe; but she never mentioned him, except to tell me that she had heard of his death.  She did not whitewash the next day, for Charles came down with the measles, and was tended by her with a fretful tenderness.  Veronica was seized soon after, and then Arthur, and then I had them.  Veronica was the worst patient.  When her room was darkened she got out of bed, tore down the quilt that was fastened to the window, and broke three panes of glass before she could be captured and taken back.  The quilt was not put up again, however.  She cried with anger, unless her hands were continually washed with lavender water, and made little pellets of cotton which she stuffed in her ears and nose, so that she might not hear or smell.

I went to Dr. Snell’s as soon as I was able.  He was in his bedchamber, writing a sermon on fine note-paper, and had disarranged the wide ruffles of his shirt so that he looked like a mildly angry turkey.  Thrusting his spectacles up into the roots of his hair, he rose, and led me into a large room adjoining his bedroom, which contained nothing but tall bookcases, threw open the doors of one, pushed up a little ladder before it, for me to mount to a row of volumes bound in calf, whose backs were labeled “British Classics.”  “There,” he said, “you will find ‘The Spectator,’” and trotted back to his sermon, with his pen in his mouth.  I examined the books, and selected Tom Jones and Goldsmith’s Plays to take home.  From that time I grazed at pleasure in his oddly assorted library, ranging from “The Gentleman’s Magazine” to a file of the “Boston Recorder”; but never a volume of poetry anywhere.  I became a devourer of books which I could not digest, and their influence located in my mind curious and inconsistent relations between facts and ideas.

My music lessons in Milford were my only task.  I remained inapt, while Veronica played better and better; when I saw her fingers interpreting her feelings, touching the keys of the piano as if they were the chords of her thoughts, practice by note seemed a soulless, mechanical effort, which I would not make.  One day mother and I were reading the separate volumes of charming Miss Austen’s “Mansfield Park,” when a message arrived from Aunt Mercy, with the news of Grand’ther Warren’s dangerous illness.  Mother dropped her book on the floor, but I turned down the leaf where I was reading.  She went to